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Ooze of Booze
Posted by: Neo (06/22/2019) * C-Rank Description Any passing Blue Hood will notice a medium-sized, largely stained napkin tacked to the job board. It’s a “note” from the Underchef written in crude Common; “Come see Tanoq. Need help. Booze.” It’s signed with a goblin handprint. Journals Wren (07/06/2019) Let it be known that if a job seems too easy, it is because there are seven other layers of something going on. I was utterly baffled as to why C ranks were being hired by the kitchen cook to fetch a recipe, but according to the goblin Tanoq - do not eat the soup, my friends - that is exactly what was needed. He requested we travel a day south to an inn to see his friend Kodai, to fetch a recipe for drink (mead, I think?) and bring it back. Easy, hm? Not quite. Upon traveling down and reaching the Inn, we discovered things were much more complicated than expected. Kodai was not an elf as we had been told, but a dwarf - and an unhappy fellow at that. He was quite angry with us, but told us a few things I will not repeat, requesting we vacate the area. I noted a boarded up basement door on the way in, and bringing it up gave me little information. I also noticed that Kodai seemed a little ... afraid, oddly enough. When I confronted him about it, he admitted to dropping the recipe down in the basement, but was unable to tell me why he had been down there in the first place. He did tell us the inn was owned by a man called Doneel. When asked about the basement, he could give me little answers - as if he had forgotten everything of importance. This was the first hint. We wandered back out front, looking to ask why the basement was boarded up - and no one really knew. We asked about Doneel, intending to question him about his inn, only to be informed shortly after that Doneel had been dead for a hundred years and that it was Kodai who owned the inn. Once again, no one knew anything about the basement, why it was boarded up ... nothing. We intended to question others within the Inn, and here I discovered something unnerving. After talking with one of the waitresses, Rayna, she promptly turned back to me and spoke as if we had never met. It seemed everything we had just said was all foreign to her, and she was confused as to how I knew her name. A goblin entered the Inn, the first visitor beside ourselves I had ever seen. We talked to him for a time, and he told us - the all the people there, all the works and the patrons, all lived in the Inn. They always had. Unsettling. We left the goblin to drink his ale, stepped back to talk, and ... shortly after the scene repeated. The goblin returned, drank, talked, and left. Dorian followed him out, only to discover him disappearing a certain distance past the Inn. Thormak even tried to punch him, thinking it might snap the fellow out of some trance, but it seemed to have no effect. Deciding we had nothing further to accomplish, we went into the basement, only to promptly be attacked by the barrels. And oozes, to be fair - some sort of red, squishy creature who weakened my companions significantly. We dealt with them fairly easy, although they were irritating, but there was no sign of the recipe. Further in, the basement wall had shattered, leading to a cavern. There were even more of the aggressive kegs, which sounds like a joke and ... definitely is not. Unfortunately more of the barrels and oozes were not our only problem. In one of the tunnels, we ran into a creature I am all too familiar with - a Mindflayer. We fortunately made short work of it, but part of me wishes I had followed my instincts and left before. The caverns became what looked to be ruins of some old structure. Some building. Within, there were perhaps a dozen tiny green slimes, funny little things. They were relatively harmless, but not so was something else. I only saw it in glimpses, stuck hiding around the corner - it was like a mindflayer, but ... worse. It hit use through walls with blasts of psychic energy, again and again, and we survived only by chance. Luck, as it were. I think someone has a saying about that. Once it was dead, we crushed the tadpole from within - something you should always do, my friends. We found another tadpole, one Thormak attempted to keep in a jar, but eventually we crushed it. Yet, even with the monster dead, there was still the feeling of being watched. Something else lived in the ruins beneath the inn. In one of the rooms we did finally find the recipe, but I could not bring myself to leave the people above to be stuck under such a strange existence. Truthfully, I'm not sure we would have been able to leave if we had tried. Instead, we went up the stairs - finding an enormous brain crackling with magical energy, and all around it, figures in robes. They seemed utterly out of it. The brain itself was an annoyance. Difficult. It stunned Einarr and Dorian for a time, and it was difficult to get them out of it, but between all of us, we were able to kill the thing. The sensation of being watched faded, and those still alive below woke. Confused. They seemed to have little idea of how long it had been, and once we reached above the surface, we found the Inn itself gone, burned to the ground. I am not sure what happened in that place, or what will happen going forward. For now, job success.